I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.
So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.
This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.
If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
I had some very basic "double check" type questions about my very straightforward taxes I threw at the bot because it was handy and it didn't seem to know that it was even related to taxes or tax software and literally directed me to seek out someone who might know about taxes. I then asked it about the weather and it was able to talk freely about that, just seems like they're reselling another model with a different prompt up front or a RAG.
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.
If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/.
I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.
I was forced to use their shitty desktop version inside a Windows VM because I don't have any Windows or Mac machines, and the web version doesn't support married filing federal jointly and state separately.
Their desktop version seems like a webapp embedded inside browser frame; I don't understand why they can't make it available on the web.
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this.
So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember that that check was easy to patch out. (As are several other checks of interest.)
> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.
You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.
Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.
I had a mixed experience with it. I think it has enormous potential but it needs to be more deeply integrated with their system (while staying read only by default, as you said).
> I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
I've been using TurboTax for about 20 years now and I am not happy. I hate it with a passion, it has more dark patterns than even LinkedIn and with my basic W-2 tax return with HDHP I managed to hit all their 'know issues' 4 years in a row. They of course offered me to upgrade several times during the 'work flow' to make up for it.
I loathe the existence of Intuit and I still have some hope that a future administration will kill it by having the IRS implement a basic digital product for federal tax filing for the 90% of people who use the standard deduction. Intuit should not exist in its current form in any civilized country, it is a form of cancer which only exists because our politicians are a bunch of greedy fucks.
Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products?
> "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective."
Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...
These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.
If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?
"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.
The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.
Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.
> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place
> These things are knowable
There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.
Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.
Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.
That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.
And there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
That's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do.
There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.
Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
This. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise.
I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit.
The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations.
That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
tbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes.
As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
Nah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
Intuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company.
Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc.
Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
You would think arithmetic should be deterministic, but just days ago I received paper mail from IRS saying my tax software computed federal tax underpayment penalty incorrectly, and they are refunding me > $300.
1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading.
2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.
ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
The more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
> In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier.
So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.
This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.
If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
Their desktop software. If you’re going to switch off the desktop software to something, it may as well be something that isn’t turbotax.
My dad had to upgrade his PC recently to do his taxes as it was stuck on Windows 10 due to CPU support. I suggested a Mac Mini, but neglected to confirm that turbotax Canada supports macOS with their desktop software. My dad had no interest the website version, so he bought another Windows laptop and now has both the Mac Mini and his “tax laptop” that he plans to only use once a year.
Some people are just ingrained in their habits and not interested in change. (Though my retired father was perfectly willing to try a Mac for the first time - apparently new tax software was a bridge too far.)
Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.
My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.
Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families.
We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.
I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.
So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.
This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.
If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?
Your experience is way different from mine.
I had some very basic "double check" type questions about my very straightforward taxes I threw at the bot because it was handy and it didn't seem to know that it was even related to taxes or tax software and literally directed me to seek out someone who might know about taxes. I then asked it about the weather and it was able to talk freely about that, just seems like they're reselling another model with a different prompt up front or a RAG.
I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.
If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/.
I made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.
I was forced to use their shitty desktop version inside a Windows VM because I don't have any Windows or Mac machines, and the web version doesn't support married filing federal jointly and state separately.
Their desktop version seems like a webapp embedded inside browser frame; I don't understand why they can't make it available on the web.
I WAS a happy TurboTax customer for over 33 years, until this year when I used HR Block TaxCut to file my 2025 returns. Intuit insisted that only Windows 11 would be supported, for no technical reason whatsoever. I assume they got a payoff from Microsoft for doing this.
So now I see they're laying off 3000 employees and wonder if it has something to do with poor sales of TurboTax because of their lame policy.
They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember that that check was easy to patch out. (As are several other checks of interest.)
> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.
You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.
Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.
We have an app for that. Would you like me to write a new one?
I could feed a lot of posts into ELIZA...
Yes, A rock-solid workflow for 54+ years.
And ELISA.BAS is still running strong. Its just classic human psychology.
I had a mixed experience with it. I think it has enormous potential but it needs to be more deeply integrated with their system (while staying read only by default, as you said).
Just a quick note that you are also telling a story about how TurboTax could be overstaffed.
Stop being a "happy customer". We shouldn't be paying in the first place.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
> I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
I've been using TurboTax for about 20 years now and I am not happy. I hate it with a passion, it has more dark patterns than even LinkedIn and with my basic W-2 tax return with HDHP I managed to hit all their 'know issues' 4 years in a row. They of course offered me to upgrade several times during the 'work flow' to make up for it.
I loathe the existence of Intuit and I still have some hope that a future administration will kill it by having the IRS implement a basic digital product for federal tax filing for the 90% of people who use the standard deduction. Intuit should not exist in its current form in any civilized country, it is a form of cancer which only exists because our politicians are a bunch of greedy fucks.
If you use TurboTax, you are part of the problem.
Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products?
> "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective."
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17p...
Seriously, the article says exactly the opposite.
The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
Boy, do I have bad news for you.
Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...
These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.
If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?
"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.
The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.
Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.
> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place
> These things are knowable
There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.
Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.
Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.
That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.
And there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
That's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do.
There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time.
I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare!
The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.
I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.
Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
The IRS's fillable forms do a perfectly fine job of copying values around and doing the basic arithmetic that they can automate.
No, that's Intuit lobbying.
Taxes are not objective. No software can reach into your life and classify your activies into legal categories.
That’s a true side fact, but that has nothing to do with how the software behaves once you input your answers.
This. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise.
I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit.
The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations.
That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
tbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes.
As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
You would correct your W2 when the amount you receive wasn't what was reported - this is exceptionally rare.
Nah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
There have been free alternatives for years.
People still pay accountants to do their very basic taxes and pay $200 for twenty minutes worth of work.
Why?
For the same reason paid software exists in this space - knowing you have someone else to blame.
Why? What's wrong with some non determism if Intuit foots any mistakes? I am all for AI auto filling taxes where the filer offering takes the burden.
To be honest I'm kinda sceptical that they will be paying fines for you.
Software licenses usually explicitly disclaim all financial damages. I assume Intuit does too (I don't use Turbotax myself).
Intuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company.
Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc.
Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
You would think arithmetic should be deterministic, but just days ago I received paper mail from IRS saying my tax software computed federal tax underpayment penalty incorrectly, and they are refunding me > $300.
1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading.
2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.
ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
Gemini and GPT did my (non-trivial) taxes this year. They're going to be laying off way more than 3k people.
The more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
> In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier.
So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.
This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.
If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
I wonder how many windows 10 users discovered freetaxusa.com works as well as turbotax this year (since Intuit doesn't support Windows 10 any more)
Their website doesn't support windows 10?
Their desktop software. If you’re going to switch off the desktop software to something, it may as well be something that isn’t turbotax.
My dad had to upgrade his PC recently to do his taxes as it was stuck on Windows 10 due to CPU support. I suggested a Mac Mini, but neglected to confirm that turbotax Canada supports macOS with their desktop software. My dad had no interest the website version, so he bought another Windows laptop and now has both the Mac Mini and his “tax laptop” that he plans to only use once a year.
Some people are just ingrained in their habits and not interested in change. (Though my retired father was perfectly willing to try a Mac for the first time - apparently new tax software was a bridge too far.)
Well, if all there QA people have left... Their "pivot" is straight off a cliff. Best of luck.
Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.
My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.
Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516)
I think this isn't terrible, actually.
If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families.
We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.